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Students joining Stanford University's school of medicine will receive a free iPad, illustrating a growing trend of Universities making use of iPad for educational as well as promotional purposes, San Francisco Chronicle reported.
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Stanford follows a growing list of Universities like UC Irvine, Abilene Christian Univeristy and USC Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism which have given away iPads to students.
Dr. Charles Prober, the senior associate dean for medical education, AT Stanford, said "Students in the classroom and the clinic will be able to search for information in real time and use it to solve problems they encounter."
From medicine schools to journalism schools, educational institutions are adopting iPads as the next tool after the notepad revolution to augment learning experience.
UC Irvine's iMedEd Initatitive is providing first year medical students with "a comprehensive, iPad-based curriculum," according to PhysOrg. The devices are equipped with all the necessary apps for note-taking, recording audio. The faculty will develop podcasts and archivie lectures.
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The Abilene Christian University has promised its incoming students a free iPhone or iPod touch.
Universities are leveraging on iPad's popularity for promotional or educational purposes. From using the Apple freebies as a bait to developing new courses around iPad, recently Stanford University's computer science department added iPad programming to its course offerings.
However, with Universities being the breeding grounds for innovation it's a welcome change which echoes the current trends in the computer market which is moving from PCs to smartphones and tablets.
Not to mention that many universities are also adding cloud computing to their infrastructure. Recently the University of Georgia adopted Live@Edu, a cloud solution by Microsoft. With cloud computing in place streaming education courseware to smartphones and tablets will be easier and faster.
Bill Gates, a Harvard drop-out and the Silicon Valley prophet, said in a Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe: "Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university."
Well, it seems with such an exuberant embrace accorded to iPads and iPhone Apple might have unwittingly ushered in such an age. However, till then students can receive on their iPads homework alerts, answer-in-class surveys, online tests and quizzes, directions from professors, library availability and other such features that are merely a touch away.
